New York Greater Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society

ISOC-NY Event: Eben Moglen ‘Freedom in the Cloud’ – 2/5/2010

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke about “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” on Friday, February 5, 2010.

Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They’ll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in. And you can’t wait to let them. They’ll store your stuff, they’ll organize your photos, they’ll keep track of your appointments, as long as they can watch. It all goes into the “Cloud.”

How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0.

DVD: ISOC Members, educators, libraries, and other interested parties can obtain a free DVD copy of this event. Email dvd@isoc-ny.org and ask for DVD1710. A $5 paypal donation to cover costs is optional.

I find it ironic that this is being broadcast in a format that I can not watch because I run a free software operating system, Trisquel, and refuse to install nonfree software on my machine such as Adobe Flash. The ISOC used to be very good at running their own free software, but the current ISOC-NY site seems to mostly consist of interfaces to nonfree web 2.0 cloud services many of which use nonfree formats such as Flash. Hopefully someone will make the talk available in Ogg Theora after it is complete, perhaps using http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/tinyogg – and hopefully Eben’s talk will have an effect on ISOC-NY leadership.

You will find it already posted in ogg above, ogv is coming. We have always posted free software related events in open formats. Unfortunately our streaming provider only utilizes flash. If you could educate us to an alternative free (as in no cost) provider utilizing a free (as in freedom) method we’ll be happy to investigate.

Insightful talk about web services with spying as a business model. Made me realise how many bugging devices I am carrying around while using the internet. If you aren’t using something like NoScript or EasyPrivacy, the following companies already now that you have read my comment: Quantserve, ShareThis, WordPress, Google, Gravatar, …. I apologize for Gravatar. That’s my fault.

I believe the problem in the html5 was caused by the fact that I didn’t have the entire ‘Video’ statement on one line and thus WordPress was throwing in spurious linebreak code. Try it now. What browser?